


One Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

by AnonAnton



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (You Decide!), First Meetings, Gen or Pre-Slash, Immortality, M/M, Meet-Cute, Mystery, Time Travelling Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 10:47:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11644995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonAnton/pseuds/AnonAnton
Summary: A ficlet written from thewipfactorypromptover on tumblr. (Almost more of a prompt than the prompt itself.)Castiel is an historian. He studies social history, which involves analysing thousands of historic photographs day after day. He's beginning to have a strange feeling that he's seen that face before…





	One Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

**Author's Note:**

> Oops! Unbetad! Apologies!

“There he is again,” he muttered, flipping back through the stack of recently developed photographs. Castiel sighed. The negatives had been hidden in a school store room for nearly eighty years and yet, there he was again. He couldn't deny it, not now he knew the face so well. It was the same man. The time traveller. The man who he saw almost every day.

The first few hundred times he had seen his face he had not noticed at all. Then he slowly began to spot him. He was handsome, but not unusually so. But he was tall, very tall for most of the eras he had been studying. The man had bright green eyes and dark blond hair, only visible in the colored photographs of later years. And he had a boyish grin in the oldest photos, his expression fading to sadness in the later ones. And that handsome face was in nearly one in ten photographs Castiel studied — He had gone back to check.

Castiel had studied tens of thousands of photographs in his time, ranging from the earliest days of photography right up to only the previous decade. In those photos the man looked simply desperate, his eyes pleading, his mouth drawn.

Castiel was beginning to get chills every time he saw his face.

-

Castiel nearly fainted in the art gallery. He nearly threw his bottled water at the painting. 

There he was. The time traveller, painted in oils, grim faced yet just as bright eyed, as he toiled in the wheat field from 1830’s France. It wasn’t even the first time he had seen the man depicted on canvas.

Castiel was beginning to think that he should start right at the beginning; with cave paintings. He was certain he would find bright green daubs of paint on the deepest darkest walls illustrating the man's lively eyes.

Castiel was also considering checking into a mental institution.

-

Castiel was on a working holiday. Ten days in the next state over, collecting a stack of photographs from a colleague and taking time to see the sights. 

For his own personal project he took time out to snap some quick photos as he went. Simple street scenes. He liked to document people, just simple day to day life.

It wasn't until he heard a weak sounding “Finally,” that he looked more closely at the screen in the glare of the sun.

He looked up, his phone dropping from his fingers onto the grass at his feet. Shocked and fearful he caught the gaze of the relieved and near-tearfully joyful time traveller. Standing tall, looking worn and tired, his face a carbon copy of the one immortalised in his phone screen, was the man Castiel had watched live through thousands of days, hundreds of events, but with only one, never aging, face.

“I’ve been waiting so long for you, Cas.”


End file.
